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6 comments on “Timmy elsewhere”

Whether green technology is foisted upon us at gunpoint or by market forces is moot, the key is (as the article mentions) “energy efficiency”, the underlying reason is to consume less of the earth’s resources and produce less CO2 etc in doing so.

Currently, green technology reliant upon renewables does not achieve that goal, as mentioned in the article, energy efficiency for consumption technology is way in advance of the renewable energy production technology.

The argument in favour of renewables is the fuel cost and waste elements are essentially free, but ignores the high building and maintenance cost, which is due to the inefficiency of the mechanism.

Renewables are fuelled by sunlight, but this suffers from loss during natural transference, i.e. sunlight to wind for turbines, sunlight to wave/tide, etc, and during collection, as using turbines, PV, etc, are not the most efficient either.

The energy cost for making enough devices to counter the inefficiency could end up using more energy overall, it is this point most green technology fails on.

Instead of utilising sunlight transferred from 150m km away, you can manufacture sunlight directly on earth and convert it immediately to usable energy with minimal loss of transference, i.e. nuclear. We’ve been at this stage for decades now so why we are still considering inefficient technology ?

Discussing cost, subsidies, etc, is a side show, the real argument should be whether these technologies actually do result in a net energy saving and are not subject to awkward conditions (such as CFLs which need to be active for 6-10 years before actually being considered more energy efficient than incandescents).

As well as the lie about total energy consumption, it is worth checking something else. The clue is in the following quote.

“….and meeting the UK‘s legally binding commitments to tackle global warming will be higher than the bill would be for using traditional energy sources.”

The costs of using fossil fuels will include the costs of carbon capture. It is worth running the numbers to confirm this, with carbon capture costs at the model’s level, and then set to near zero. If this is the case then by far the cheapest option is to obtain a more balanced review of the cost/benefits climate change commitments, particularly when it is just a small number of countries meeting them.